


The Return

by Addelaide



Series: Genesis of... [1]
Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:00:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24527263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Addelaide/pseuds/Addelaide
Summary: Toby Williams has always followed his sister, but when the world he's always known and the one he's only ever dreamed of collide, it might be Sarah following him. And at thirteen, he may be  in a little over his head.
Series: Genesis of... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772530





	1. Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> On hiatus until I figure out where I want to go with this...

Toby Williams lay curled up on what used to be his older sister’s bed. His mother had long since packed away or thrown out anything Sarah had left behind when she left for college, and so the room was simple and bare except for the essentials. Set up shortly after Sarah left as a guest room. No one stayed there though, not even Sarah. Instead, when she would visit, she’d fit herself into Toby’s bottom bunk and tell him stories until the wee hours of the morning. 

But Toby hadn’t seen his sister in months. What with one thing and another with work and theatre, and the added bonus of yet another argument in a string of arguments between Sarah and his mother, she hadn’t visited in a while. At present, he only had the letter’s she sent with drawings, and pictures of her at school, and the quilts she made for him in her spare time. 

He curled under those now, comfortably warm and replaying stories she told him of fantastic adventures and a labyrinth so big you’d never reach the end. Wishing he could go on adventures like that. They rocked him to sleep, filling his head with sword fights, fairy’s, and magic words.


	2. Down the Rabbit Hole (Part 1)

Toby looked out at the audience, rows and rows of empty seats in Taft Hall I, except for where he could just make out the program director writing notes as Toby read his lines. That morning he’d woken up early to practice and make sure he was ready for the auditions for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and all throughout the day his stomach had been in knots as he watched the clock, but now – much like Sarah had once attempted to describe it to their father once upon a time before she’d given up on trying to make him understand – everything fell away and he was Puck. 

He inhabited the character, slid into his skin and forgot who he’d been. 

_“My mistress with a monster is in love._   
_Near to her close and consecrated bower,_   
_While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,_   
_A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,_   
_That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,_   
_Were met together to rehearse a play_   
_Intended for great Theseus' nuptial-day._   
_The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,_   
_Who Pyramus presented, in their sport_   
_Forsook his scene and_ _enter'd_ _in a brake_   
_When I did him at this advantage take,_

 _An ass's_ _nole_ _I fixed on his head:_   
_Anon his Thisbe must be answered,_   
_And forth my mimic comes. When they him spy,_   
_As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,_   
_Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,_   
_Rising and cawing at the gun's report,_   
_Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,_   
_So, at his sight, away his fellows fly;_   
_And, at our stamp, here o'er and o'er one falls;_   
_He_ _murder_ _cries and help from Athens calls._   
_Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears_   
_thus strong,_   
_Made senseless things begin to do them wrong;_   
_For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch;_   
_Some sleeves, some hats, from yielders all_   
_things catch._   
_I led them on in this distracted fear,_   
_And left sweet Pyramus translated there:_   
_When in that moment, so it came to pass,_   
_Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.”_

It was an  exhilarating feeling, being someone else and forgetting, for a time at least, that he wasn’t some Shakespearean  fairy creature. He threw himself into it, had been doing so since he was very little and had watched his sister act out stage plays for him in her room. That it made his mother at least a little uncomfortable on the days when she forgot and marched into his room without warning and found him hunched over and rubbing his hands together like a very old witch plotting to snatch up all the towns children, wasn’t a deterrent.  But a small part of his mind always stood by to remind him who he really was, Toby Williams, age thirteen, brown hair, blue eyes, exceedingly average. He hated that part. The part that pulled him, now, from the dreamy state of being he’d found himself in, and back to the present where the director smiled up at him before shouting ‘next’. 

Then came the come down, a necessary evil of acting. Toby trudged off stage, grabbing his bag, and making his way out the hall doors and out of the school. He’d missed the bus because of auditions, and so he made his way home on foot, droopy eyed and descending slow like lukewarm honey. He passed the park and the community gardens, dogs with their owners out for their midafternoon walk, teenage girls that held hands and giggled over teenage boys, the mailman finishing up his rounds, and finally Mrs. Lincoln – the first and biggest house at the beginning of his street – pruning her roses. She saw him and waved distractedly, and kept going about her day, and he smiled his greeting. He walked along for fifteen minutes before his house came in sight, his mother, a shaky vision peering out the window, waiting for him. And before he had reached the porch  steps, she was running out to him, noting his dreariness almost immediately. Irene Williams didn’t understand her son’s obsession with acting, had hoped he wouldn’t inherit his  half-sister's inclination towards the arts. She loved her son, though, and he was who he was, so she was there for him the best way she could be. 

She  herded him into the house, sending him up the stairs to shower and nap until dinner and homework, her eyes tracking his movements with only the slightest bit of worry. 

Toby, for his part, remembered very little about the interaction, finding himself in his bed drifting down, down, down to sleep and dreamed of nothing. 

Half a country away, Sarah Williams walked into the apartment she rented alone, suddenly more tired than her day  warranted . It was all she could do to make it to her bedroom, falling face first into her bed with all the grace and determination of a toddler. Her eyes closing on the image of familiar wings and the shattering of something infinitely more troubling then glass. In a hall of white faced only with a rippling mirror, she stared into the waves and a face not her own stared back. 


End file.
